6 ms·
Making RAM at Home [video]
- Rendello 6mo agoI wasn't expecting what the inside of the shed would be like!
- JuniperMesos 6mo agoThere's another video on YouTube by the same guy detailing how he built his backyard clean room shed. I was kind of surprised at how easy it was - it's definitely a construction project that requires some specialized knowledge, but the fact that it's tractable at all for one person with a shed is pretty amazing to me.
- generuso 6mo agoOf course it not easy. He spent $20k on materials and a good amount of elbow grease just to construct this one room. In order to maintain the clean environment the air circulation runs 24/7 and he washes all the surfaces daily using cleanroom wipes. Deionized water system provides water for washing the cleanroom gowns. It is a lot of work just to have a small facility at home for odd jobs.
- dlcarrier 6mo agoThis guy is proof that newcomers to YouTube can still succeed, if they find the right niche.
- jcattle 6mo agoAnd are doing exceptional things (like building their own cleanroom in a shed)
- ivanjermakov 6mo agoContent creation was always about content. If you can make something special and engaging, audience will come.
- acuozzo 6mo ago> If you can make something special and engaging ... and sufficiently interesting to more than a very small group of persons.
- utopiah 6mo agoIs it? Looks like this video is "locked" on Patreon requiring "this post and more exclusive work. Join for $10/month" yet got, as of now, 329 611 views ... so are they just making $3M/month or is it not really working?
- Milner08 6mo agoWhat are you talking about? The video is free on YouTube. Patreon is just another way of supporting the channel beyond the usual ad-sense, sponsors, etc. No one is expecting them to make a fortune over night, but it at least shows there is space for new people. This video was actually push into my feed by youtube which is rare for new creators. So they clearly are doing pretty well in the grand scheme of things.
- utopiah 6mo agoWhat do you mean with "What are you talking about?" while my comment literally post to the Patreon account and I copy/pasted their message. The comment of the video also says "Thanks for the support!" whereas I (maybe you are a subscriber to their Patreon but I know I'm not) have not contributed anything. Does this look normal to have locked videos behind a paywall then have it public and free elsewhere? PS: I obviously didn't expect them to make this amount (even though it would be nice) only trying to highlight that there is a mismatch and thus trying to understand what the problem is, namely is that video actually meant to be public.
- plopz 6mo ago> Does this look normal to have locked videos behind a paywall then have it public and free elsewhere? Yes, this is very normal on youtube with both patreon and nebula.
- utopiah 6mo agoWell that's the first time I encounter this. I have been using Patreon for years and typically a creator who locks content even often mention "Please do not share outside". It's also often hosted on YouTube but usually unlisted. Can you please give me an example of locked content that is openly shared outside? I guess I don't understand the monetization in that situation so I'd appreciate if you could help me get what they are doing here.
- schmeichel 6mo agoSubscribed. Genuinely looking forward to what this gent gets up to.
- readitalready 6mo agoI only buy free-range artisanal DRAM at the DRAM farmer's market.
- intothemild 6mo agoI only have raw RAM, pastured RAM is wrong. I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.
- keysersoze33 6mo agoAdmit it, deep down, our inner engeering child also wants to build a semiconductor clean room ;)
- canpan 6mo agoWhile that would be cool, something like the 7400 series, is already pretty close to scratching that itch. And a lot less dangerous.
- readitalready 6mo agoI do but my days in the fab taught me that you do NOT want people to do this, considering the extremely dangerous chemicals involved. People have died changing EMPTY tanks of phosphine gas used for doping… and HF acid used for etch is another nightmare entirely.
- takihito 6mo agoKnowing that really helps you understand just how valuable semiconductors are as a product.
- LPisGood 6mo agoI saw this video yesterday and considered posting it, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for HN. This channel has another video where it shows how the clean room lab is created starting from a basic backyard shed, and that was truly astounding. The positive pressure to keep the number of particles low in someone’s backyard is almost mystical to me.
- waterTanuki 6mo agoRecently I saw a post about Bonsai trees on the front page. Making your own RAM is 100% more relevant to HN than quite a few posts I see on the main page.
- vlovich123 6mo agoYou’re not sure if someone building a RAM clean room in a shed is appropriate for HackerNews, literally “news for nerds”? A dictionary purchase may be warranted
- CamperBob2 6mo agoSpoiler: we never actually get to see the RAM tested
- eichin 6mo agoThe graphs towards the end were discharge curves for a single transistor/capacitor cell out of only 16 present, if I understood correctly? So "enough cells to count as memory" and "addressing logic" are definitely future work (it looked like he wanted to characterize what the refresh cycle would have to look like before actually building more.) I was kind of surprised that the "use a microscope as a photolithography projector" approach worked at all, it will be interesting to see how that scales up...
- debo_ 6mo agoMom: We have RAM at home! RAM at home:
- readitalready 6mo agoBackyard semiconductor production is pretty similar to backyard barbecue. Lots of heating, smoking (diffusion), injecting (ion implant), and layering..
- allenrb 6mo agoWith enough sauce, the end result won’t even taste like chewing on a rock. :-)
- CamperBob2 6mo agoAnd lighting your charcoal with piranha solution...
- kennywinker 6mo agoNobody tell openai about this, they’ll buy up all his stock
- ReptileMan 6mo agoThey will preemptively rent all the sheds in the usa.
- thenthenthen 6mo agoGreat time to get into the shed business!
- p0w3n3d 6mo ago1999. We will have flying cars 2024. LLMs - there will be robots 2026. How to make your own RAM
- i_think_so 6mo ago2027. Upgrade your LLM with home made RAM so you can afford to have it design your flying car
- aledevv 6mo ago2027. Just-in-time built software and hardware.
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- petee 6mo ago2030. All flying cars are actually armed drones - homefab is outlawed
- fc417fc802 6mo agoTurns out Cessnas are actually low performance missiles with an organic computer for the guidance system.
- CamperBob2 6mo ago2028. How to forage for edible plants and identify safe water sources 2030. How to make horseshoes, nails, and plate armor 2032. How to send smoke signals to neighboring villages 2034. How to defend against barbarian incursions
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoHow to make an axe from a broken RTX 4060
- jandhdhshhh 6mo agoThis is incredible! 1100 degrees in your backyard shed! And the video explains it well too
- generuso 6mo agoThe furnace is a low cost off-the-shelf Chinese product from Anhui Beq Equipment Technology Co. Much more impressive are the modifications to the microscope, transforming it into an improvised lithography machine, and the home made plasma etching machine, cobbled together from surplus components. Of course, the whole thing, starting from the clean room, is extremely impressive -- Intel started their business in a much simpler facility.
- jukkan 6mo ago"There is no DownloadMoreRAM, it's just some guy in a backyard shed." https://downloadmoreram.com/ https://downloadmoreram.com/
- treebeard901 6mo agoWith memory prices what they are maybe there is a business opportunity for a return of SoftRAM 95
- RobotToaster 6mo agoActually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.
- i_think_so 6mo agoThis is the most pathological technology I have heard of in a long time and I am not even going to apologize for upvoting and telling other people about the evil genius I found on the internet today.
- fragmede 6mo agoicymi https://scp-iota.github.io/software/2025/06/16/download-ram-swap-gdrive.html https://scp-iota.github.io/software/2025/06/16/download-ram-... tldr it's not theorical, some madman actually did that!
- askl 6mo agoHow about swap on pingfs so you aren't relying on some cloud provider? https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
- tombert 6mo agoI've thought about doing stuff like that (or mounting S3), but I've never done it because I figured that the latency would be enormous and it would be too slow to actually be useful. That said, I could actually kind of see it being useful for stuff that doesn't need to be super fast but does allocate a lot of RAM (though I'm drawing a blank on what that would be at the moment).
- the-smug-one 6mo agoSo, I get that we charge the capacitor up, and that it leaks so we must recharge it periodically. I don't get two things: 1. How is the value read? Is it reading the leak? 2. How is recharging done? I guess the leak itself (assuming my guess in 1. holds) could provide charge for some logic that checks "if has charge then recharge else nop". I still don't really get transistors :P, but this was cool.
- tooltower 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory#Principles_of_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory#P... It turns out they intentionally drain a bit of the storage capacitor, and amplify that weak signal. Some of that amplified charge is then fed back to storage.
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- tinco 6mo agoA transistor effectively is an AND gate. If there is a charge on both the source and the gate, then charge can move to drain. So if you charge up the capacitor and you connect it to the source of another transistor then you can check whether it is still charged by putting a charge to the gate and see if there is charge on the drain. And you are right, that charge on the drain can then be used both to drive some logic and to activate the recharging of the capacitor that was just discharged. By the way I am being handwavy about "charge" moving about, if you really want to learn the electronics it is more correct to call it a voltage relative to some ground that the charge always moves towards.
- peterfirefly 6mo agoYou measure the charge (if it is there) before it is completely gone (if it were ever there). Capacitors always leak, these capacitors leak fast. Measuring the charge also removes some of the charge -- fast, compared to the leak spead. DRAM chips have a circuit that writes the value back -- charges the capacitor up if there's supposed to be a charge, drains it if there's not supposed to be a charge. Refreshes and normal reads are the same, except that normal reads sends the value(s) to the output pin(s) on the chip. He has "only" shown the basic grid of capacitors and transistors. The chip he shown has no circuit to measure charges or to write them back afterwards. This makes it easier to test the basic grip and the basic capcacitors. Pretty sure the proper read out and write back circuit comes in the next video.
- apatheticonion 6mo agoI'm not sure this is what they meant when they said they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the USA lol
- RobotToaster 6mo agoChairman Trump will have a semiconductor furnace in every backyard.
- apatheticonion 6mo agoYou have to surrender your silicon(e) to the state!
- INTPenis 6mo agoJokes aside, seeing as this person has created their own clean room in a shed, and is making RAM, what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business? I'd pay less for RAM that wasn't "certified" in some official way, at least it works.
- moffkalast 6mo agoSo, CXMT?
- chii 6mo ago> what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business? nothing, except the terrible yields that they would obtain, and the lack of scale making the entire enterprise not profit generating (as the amount of profit per sale is too low if it even is positive, but you can't set it higher as there's cheaper, "better" ram available from pre-established fabs that do have economies of scale). You could play the artisanal angle, and market it as home grown, organic ram. Not sure how much real buyers of ram care, but might get a few hobbyists in the market.
- INTPenis 6mo ago
- ReptileMan 6mo agoWe need to be able to make semiconductors at home for computing freedom to be preserved the way the world is going.
- fastjack42 6mo agoTechnologies that were considered "high-tech" 20-30 years ago are now accessible to regular people. Making DRAM. I remember a video recently of a guy making his own floppy disks. Next I expect people to manufacture integrated circuits that have been discontinued. Like the Z80
- generuso 6mo agoIt is not really feasible to fabricate usable integrated circuits at home. There is a huge difference between a one off demonstration of a principle that "sort of works", and perfecting the process to the point that it produces finished parts that can be relied on. This guy is not exactly a regular person. He is a pretty unique case of a talented semiconductor engineer who has a home lab for side hassles. It is not a low effort thing. He runs the equipment 24/7, scrubs all the surfaces in the lab daily to keep it clean. Still, with the lab and all of the equipment already at hand, it cost him several weeks of work to produce this demonstration of transistors and capacitors, which kind of work, but are still long ways from a "completely complete" 20 bit DRAM chip. Unfortunately it is simply too much work for one person to maintain a viable semiconductor fabrication process, even when it is done semi-professionally.
- egeres 6mo agoMakes me wonder if in the far future it will be ever possible to do something crazy like 7nm processes at home
- 6mo ago
- clauderx 6mo agoYou're telling me we can free download more RAM now?
- darrenc81 6mo agoOh man my shed could never be this clean
- doublerabbit 6mo agoI'm still to own a shed. The best I have is an apartment with no garden.
- shevy-java 6mo agoConsidering how AI companies and older hardware manufacturing companies are driving up the RAM prices - thus, milking all of us ultimately - I think 3D printing needs to become the new default. And affordable too, eventually (it already is, for cheap things, e. g. plastics or PLA based printing, this is often much cheaper than ordering this from a company, but I mean with regards to computer systems too. Naturally right now we are far away from the nanoscale here, but I see this simply as a situation that will change eventually, given enough time). Those AI companies and hardware manufacturers lost all right to further dictate and increase prices. Capitalism does not work as de-facto blackmail monopoly - or should not. If a state fails to protect the people, such as in the USA right now under the orange king, then the people need to insist on change. ALL steps against this tyranny from a few superrich needs to end. Right now the legislation is going in the way how lobbyists want this, e. g. trying to make 3D printing illegal, but I think technology will obsolete such illegal laws eventually. Tyranny will eventually fail.
- thenthenthen 6mo agoPhotolithography is way more practical, 3d printing principles are already used here in stepping of the mask.
- yuvrajmalgat 6mo agosuch good idea ( so called home made )
- rzgrozt 6mo agonowadays, we need cheap ram solutions :')
- mrfatha 6mo agoI always dreamed about this when i was a child
- illuminum 6mo agoIt appears that the creator built a setup inspired by HackerFab, which is a collection of open source tools and resources for chip manufacturing. It's a fantastic project, and I recommend people check it out: https://docs.hackerfab.org/home https://docs.hackerfab.org/home
- mehulashah 6mo agoThis is cool.
- tantalor 6mo agoThat's not a lab assistant, looks more like a poodle
- muyuu 6mo agoliterally tackling the RAM problem bit by bit
- reenorap 6mo agoGreat video, very much has NileRed vibes.
- keithxm23 6mo agoIncredible video! I've been in tech for 20 years but never really bothered to dive in to the process of making RAM. This is eye-opening and makes me appreciate the sophistication of the tech involved in making those ram-sticks.
- coderssh 6mo agoThis is fascinating, but it really highlights how insane modern hardware manufacturing has become. Would be interesting to know where the biggest bottleneck shows up first: materials, lithography, or error rates?
- Smalltalker-80 6mo agoA was waiting for the part where he slides his little wafer chip into an ASML High NA EUV...
- gray_wolf_99 6mo agoI think I’ve seen a similar video where the person was explaining how to increase your RAM on your android device. I don’t know if it’s possible. I personally never tried it. has anyone tried it before?
- SilentM68 6mo agoGood video, informative, easy to digest. You should start your own company, perhaps as in the form of an employee-owned entity or using Kickstarter to create an all-in-one RAM Fab kit that can be sold online. I'm sure the maker community may consider buying it.
- hermitShell 6mo ago"Mom can we get some RAM?" "No dear, we have RAM at home." RAM at home...
- uxtestuser1 6mo ago[dead]